Tag Archives: BBS

Online bulletin board inventor Randy Suess dies at 74

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It's a sad week if you've ever posted on a social network or an internet forum. Randy Suess, the creator of the software for first online public bulletin board, died on December 10th at the age of 74. He and Ward Christensen built the Computer Bull...

This is the Modem World: The sinister side of the ’80s BBS

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Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

This is the Modem World The sinister side of the '80s BBS

Some of the following, for legal reasons, may or may not be fictional.

My first modem was a 300-baud Apple-Cat II. It was an expansion card for the Apple II and simply plugged into a phone line. It was, simply put, a bad-ass piece of technology that turned me into a total digital delinquent. While my parents thought I was innocently learning to code BBSes (bulletin board systems) I was actually learning how to get things for free and paving the way for software pirates, phone phreaks and straight-up frauds of the future.

The Apple-Cat II could connect to other Apple-Cat IIs at 1200 baud, which made file transfers pretty quick for the time. This meant we could trade entire games in about an hour. We'd log into bulletin board systems, share lists of things we had and set up times to dial one another to trade games. Usually a barter would take place -- your Aztec for my Hard Hat Mack. It was a lot like trading baseball cards, I imagine.

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Back in the BBS days: how-to helps newbs navigate to a pre-internet playground

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Back in the BBS days howto hack helps newbs navigate to a preinternet playground

The web has an origin story, one that predates any cozy trip in the wayback machine. That's because where we're going, there is no internet -- at least, not as you now know it -- only Bulletin Board Systems. And to help guide curious digital natives on this journey back to the time tech forgot, a programmer by the handle of Proppelerpowered has whipped up a how-to that leverages nothing more than a microcontroller-based microcomputer and BASIC knowledge. The brief step-by-step, listed over on Instructables, requires intrepid geeks to build a Pocket Mini computer, which purportedly takes only "an evening," after which they'll have to tinker with some low-level coding to complete the connection setup, hitch a ride online via PC and then link up with any number of active BBSs around the world. For the purposes of this beginner guide, you'll have instructions for access to a Canada-based Commodore 64 clearly laid out. But the more adept are encouraged to swap out the standard setup for an ANSI terminal and wade into serious retro-gaming waters (Trade Wars, anyone?). Hit up the source below to peek the blow-by-blow and see if this hack's made for you.

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Back in the BBS days: how-to helps newbs navigate to a pre-internet playground originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Aug 2012 02:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Hack A Day  |  sourceInstructables  | Email this | Comments

BBS version of Google takes you back in time, won’t hog your phone line

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BBS version of Google takes you back in time, won't hog your phone line
If the third digit of your birth year is a nine (or heck, a zero), you'll likely never have experienced the true agony joy that was BBS or Bulletin Board Systems. Well, thanks to nostalgic developer Norbert Landsteiner, you can take a glimpse at how your dad got online with an HTML / JavaScript emulation BBS Google. Likewise, more seasoned travelers of the internet can take a trip down memory lane and see what Mountain View's search engine might have looked like "back in the day." All the details are there, right down to the familiar modem tones and ASCII graphics, it's even somewhat functional (when the API isn't over its limit.) So, want to appreciate that browser you complain about on twitter all the time over your LTE connection? Tab on down to the source link for a lesson in gratitude.

BBS version of Google takes you back in time, won't hog your phone line originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Apr 2012 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web  |  sourceMasswerk  | Email this | Comments